Prior art joysticks have been conventionally used to provide positioning information in a variety of configurations. Normally however, these prior art units have been tiltable in at least 4 directions and have often had one or more control buttons for firing missiles etc. Some of these prior art units have had acceleration sensing means to determine how fast the stick has been moved for providing not only directional control to an object but also acceleration.
Some joysticks such as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,641,123 to James Whitehead and assigned to RCA are designed to sense vertical (Z axis) directional movement in addition to a tilt generated X and Y axis movement. This device even permits limited rotational movement detection.
To obtain more freedom of control others such as Hirabayashi in U.S. Pat. No. 5,329,276 have used relatively expensive angular velocity detectors in a hand held device. Since such a device has no reference base, switches must be used to tell the device when to start and stop generating output signals indicative of movement. Thus there is no solid initial position reference point available to either the person operating same or the computer mechanism receiving instructions therefrom to be used in further moving the controlled object.
Substantially all known gaming type joystick devices that have been interfaced to a personal computer using a special port typically designated as a game port. A special card is required on most computers to provide a game port and thus adds expense to the playing of games. Also some games require additional input signals beyond which can be obtained from a joystick. Typically these additional inputs can be obtained from a keyboard using the keyboard input or interface built into all personal computers. All known personal computer games using the above referenced joystick devices may be played using the keyboard as the source of all signals. However, the playing of the games using keyboard generated inputs suffers from slow human response time due to the unnaturalness of formulating the input actions.
If a control mechanism could not only provide tilt in the X and Y plane but additionally vertical, rotational and X and Y axis movement motions, the human reaction or response time would be substantially minimized due to the mentally perceived correlation between hand movements and the device or object being controlled. Further, when more inputs are required than can be provided with one hand, it would be desirable, in reducing human response time, to be able to control other inputs with the other hand such that another device, such as a separate keyboard, need not be consulted visually to produce said inputs. Finally, it would be desirable to eliminate the expense of additional cards to be installed and serviced in a computer to obtain the previously referenced game port interface.
It is an thus an object of the present invention to provide a control device that has a wider range of movement detected actions (sometimes described as degrees of freedom) than has been contained in the prior art.
A further object of this invention to use the standard keyboard interface when controlling a personal computer programs responses to input signals.
A still further object of this invention is to provide apparatus that can be used concurrently with a keyboard such that either one or both may provide signals to the computer via a single port perceived by a computer as a keyboard interface.
Other objects and advantages will be apparent from a reading of the appended specification and claims along with the drawings.